Peter Sterling

Peter Sterling is Professor of Neuroscience in the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In his forty years there, he has studied brain architecture and function in the laboratory and taught neurobiology to medical and graduate students. His lifelong social activism impelled him to investigate how capitalist social organization affects brain function and thus health—leading to a new model of physiological regulation, termed “allostasis.” He is the co-author, along with Simon Laughlin, of Principles of Neural Design (2015).

Modern neuroscience suggests that the roots of consumerism lie in our neural circuits for reward learning. Contemporary capitalism truncates the diversity of satisfactions, feeding the hunger for the material rewards it offers. The enrichment of daily life and expansion of satisfactions, not their renunciation, is essential to a Great Transition.

With commentary by Neva Goodwin, David Korten, Sheldon Krimsky, and others, and a response from the author.